Tag Archives: Easton

Connecticut, the southernmost state in New England, is the third smallest state in the nation—yet the fourth most densely populated. The state is named after the large river (the Connecticut River) which flows through its middle, emptying into Long Island Sound. This name comes from an Algonquian Indian word for “long tidal river.”

If you are researching your ancestry from Connecticut, you will want to use GenealogyBank’s online Connecticut newspaper archives: 151 titles to help you search your family history in “The Constitution State,” providing coverage from 1755 to Today. There are more than 8 million newspaper articles and records in our online CT archives to trace your family tree!

Dig deep into the online archives and search for obituaries and other news articles about your ancestors in these recent and historical Connecticut newspapers online. Our CT newspapers are divided into two collections: Historical Newspapers (complete paper) and Recent Obituaries (obituaries only).

Here is our complete list of online Connecticut newspapers in the archives. Each newspaper title in this list is an active link that will take you directly to that paper’s search page, where you can begin searching for your ancestors by surnames, dates, keywords and more. The CT newspaper titles are listed alphabetically by city.

You can either print or create a PDF version of this Blog post by simply clicking on the green “Print/PDF” button below. The PDF version makes it easy to save this post onto your desktop or portable device for quick reference—all the Connecticut newspaper links will be live.

Newspapers have been the chief “social networking” tool for over 300 years—and that’s a good thing for genealogists.

Newspapers’ social columns reported on the comings and goings of members of the local community, providing personal details that give a glimpse into the daily lives of our ancestors.

For example, here we have word that Dorothy Easton was visiting her sister Mrs. K. Summers in San Francisco.

Western Outlook (Oakland, California), 3 July 1915, page 3

This mention is just a one-liner buried in a social briefs column—just one line—but it is loaded with great genealogical clues:

the year is 1915

one sister is Dorothy

she’s not married

her surname is Easton

she lives in Los Angeles

the other sister is called “K”

she’s married

her surname is Summers

she lives in San Francisco

This social brief notice could be the critical clue to learn the maiden name, hometown and more about the family of K. Summers.

Enter Last Name

Notice that the Western Outlook groups these briefs by town, with headings such as “San Francisco Items” and “Oakland Jottings.” Newspapers were written to sell. Editors made them personal by including these local social briefs to excite the local readers. Picture the impact of seeing your name or your neighbor’s name written up in the paper. That was big news.

You would take the newspaper over to give to them, talk about it with them, and mention it to your wider circle of friends. It is exactly like social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) today. It holds your attention; you comment on it and share it.

Here is another example of newspaper social networking, from 1879.

Daily Gazette (Rockport, Illinois), 18 November 1879, page 4

This notice provides great clues to more family information:

the year is 1879

Carrie Carpenter is single

she opened her own school in Stephenson County

her mother is Mrs. Mary L. Carpenter

her mother is County Superintendent of Public Schools

she has a sister

This article appeared on page 4, under the masthead of the newspaper just like the previous example from the Western Outlook, but in this case the social brief notices are not grouped and labeled by the town the persons mentioned lived in, or by an organization or topic.

Enter Last Name

While the format varies from newspaper to newspaper, it has been very common for the past three centuries to include these local social briefs of such high interest to the public.

Genealogy Tip: Be sure to perform a broad search for your target ancestor, including all of GenealogyBank’s deep newspaper archive. By limiting a search to only the newspapers in your town or state, you might miss key articles (like these social briefs) about your ancestor that appeared in a newspaper from across the country.

GenealogyBank has added the backfiles of more than 100 newspapers from 28 U.S. states! This is great news for genealogists—so start searching now.

Every day we work to fill in missing issues in our newspaper archives of more than 6,100 titles so that you can do deeper genealogy research. Thousands of newspaper pages were added in this latest addition, totaling more than 25 million articles to help you fill in the gaps on your family tree.

Five newspapers (marked with an asterisk in the table below) are titles new to GenealogyBank.

These new titles include one newspaper from Florida and four from Georgia:

Plant City Observer (Plant City, Florida)

Fayette Chronicle (Fayetteville, Georgia)

Fayette County News (Fayette, Georgia)

Today in Peachtree City (Fayetteville, Georgia)

East Coweta Journal (Senoia, Georgia)

Here is the complete list of our latest newspaper additions. Each title is an interactive link taking you directly to that newspaper’s search form.

Over the past 50 years I have heard of many ways to source and document our ancestors.

Genealogists will “dig up” all types of sources but the solution that the Phillips family used has to be the most unusual.

I recently came across this, the most unusual genealogy sourcing story I have ever heard of. I found it in the Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 15 April 1891, page 1.

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 15 April 1891, page 1

In 1891 the Phillips literally dug up their Family Bible that had been buried in the grave of a niece 25 years earlier.

This unusual story begins with Isaac Phillips (1766-1834), who was born in Easton, Massachusetts. He left his hometown in 1813 and moved to the South where he was “engaged in the slave trade and accumulated an enormous fortune.” He kept his money—over $5 million at the time—at the Manhattan Bank of New York.

Isaac died in 1834, “his wife and only child having previously died.” For the next 70 years his relatives tried to prove their right to the fortune Isaac left behind. They had a lot of difficulty in tracking and documenting their genealogy and finally determined that the Family Bible had the answers.

But there was a problem: the Family Bible was buried in a cemetery. It seems that it was buried in the casket along with Isaac’s niece Susana Phillips, who died 4 June 1866.

The money was still safely in the bank, accumulating interest all the while. It was now worth more than $6 million—so the family secured permission to exhume Susana’s body and remove the Family Bible.

When they opened the grave the Family Bible was found and, although a little decayed, the family history “record [was] still perfectly legible” and gave them the information they needed to prove their genealogical connection and claim the family fortune.

Moral of the story: Keep an accurate and complete family history and preserve your documentation, like Family Bibles, that prove the record.

GenealogyBank has added more than 306 million newspaper articles!One year ago we had 174 million articles. Today we have 480 million newspaper articles – in 4,300 newspapers — in all GenealogyBank has over 566 million books, documents and records on the entire site!!